Microsoft

Update - Oct 4th 12:18 PM EST. Below I reference the market cap of Dialogic to be around $60M as this was the number publicly available at the time. The company informs me the value is closer to $160M with the Dialogic shares combines. I apologize to my readers for the error.

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Dialogic's merger with Veraz has officially closed and and the new company will be called Dialogic and have the symbol the company used in the nineties before it was acquired by Intel - DLGC.

Hi all, my marketing team was good enough to provide me with this comprehensive overview of ITEXPO and all the related events and content at the show which takes place Oct 4-6, 2010 - yes, next week. I hope this snapshot is something you find useful.

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CDW recently performed a survey discussing just how much money is lost by business to disruption. Here are some of the findings:

200 businesses completed the survey

Half (51 percent) experienced problems connecting to their IT network from other locations

Half (50 percent) had problems connecting from inside their business locations

Nearly half of respondents (46 percent) said employees could not access the necessary company resources to do their jobs

Almost one-third (29 percent) said employees had problems communicating with each other via internal phone systems and/or e-mail

28 percent said their networks were slower than expected and could not support the increased traffic from remote locations

Hardware failures caused 29 percent of network outages, followed by a loss of telecom services to facilities (21 percent)

The survey reinforces the importance of of business continuity planning and moreover as we become more connected and our applications continue to rely more on the cloud, outages which used to cause minimal damage can become downtime disasters.

The Avaya Flare interface is designed to be your enterprise social network and I recently witnessed it in person and running on an Avaya tablet which had a video camera, stereo speakers and more.

Avaya, Cisco and RIM want to be the enterprise tablet provider of choice and in Avaya's case their strategy revolves heavily around collaboration and video - they really see their solution as more of a competitor to the entry-level telepresence and other video endpoint companies.

I could go on but I am sure you've seen my live blog from the launch event by now and you are likely just as excited as I am to hear Avaya's Phil Edholm speak at ITEPO in LA about these exciting new developments. Mark your calendar for Tuesday, Oct 5th at 12:45 PST. Here are the details.

The organizers also announced a charity connection to StartupCamp that is sure to add intrigue to an already high-energy evening. Audience members will each receive up to $100,000 in play money, and with it instantly become "angel investors" for a night. Once all the companies have presented, attendees will be asked to "place their bets" by creating a portfolio of at least two of the startups.

We know Microsoft hasn't made an acquisition in a while and lately, this fact has become all the rage on the web.

The reason is simple, the company is too large to be as efficient as it once was and it is currently dealing with a wealth of challenges in the mobile, tablet and cloud spaces which require slow and careful introspection.

The company has lots of cash cow businesses but perhaps in the future it needs to become more streamlined and divide up into smaller working groups with more autonomy. This approach didn't work for the SMB PBX Response Point group so it is unclear what the software giant needs to do to become more nimble.

Odds are the only solution is a reorg and management shakeup.

But even if this is done, the largest concern the company should have is the onslaught of slick Apple devices continuing to grow in market share.

At seven inches in size the new PlayBook tablet from RIM is a hybrid smartphone/tablet - smaller than the iPad but bigger than your favorite smartphone. With front and rear cameras and multitasking support the device leapfrogs the iPad in many ways. And let's not forget RIM's legendary enterprise support.

But RIM devices have never been as cool as Apple's but I would argue the back button on the device makes up for any of the challenges it has on the coolness front. Apple users understand how maddening it is to click on a link in an email, get a web browser then have to hit the home and email icons to get back to their original email.

Federating and aggregation are key to carriers looking to compete in the new world was a message from the Metaswitch Forum this morning during the CTO Show presentation. Andy Randall, senior vice president of marketing and business development, sets the stage for CTO Chris Mairs who lays out a service provider blueprint for the next decade.

The audience was presented with a a colorful history of technology starting with the steam engine to the present and there was lots of talk about common day opportunities.

One recurring theme was Google as customer - carriers know the search engine is competitor but talk of working with them as a customer was frequent. Other discussions revolved around open APIs and and the company will participate in ecommerce and social networking companies through loose affiliations.

Transition to cloud will be a fundamental reconfiguration of our business and those adjacent to our own. Carriers will have to look to new ecosystems to replace current revenue streams.